CHICAGO, IL (March 9, 2018) – Covenanters routinely share links to social media articles and videos that Covenant News Service believes may be of interest to others. Each Friday we post five of them. Following is a sample of those submissions—their inclusion does not represent an endorsement by the Covenant of any views expressed.

Finally, the music of Sister Rosetta Tharpe is being rediscovered. The post includes a 59-minute video about the woman who went largely forgotten but who influenced many legendary musicians.

From the article: “Little Richard, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash each named Tharpe as one of their fondest childhood influences. ‘Sister Rosetta Tharpe was anything but ordinary and plain,’ said Bob Dylan on his radio program. ‘She was a big, good-looking woman and divine, not to mention sublime and splendid. She was a powerful force of nature–a guitar-playing, singing evangelist.’”

We all need people who will speak truth into our lives, and Ron Adams, the 70-year-old assistant coach with the Golden State Warriors, has been doing that with players on and off the court with teams for decades. But he also is an encourager and has been willing to learn from others as well.

From the article: “Today, on a supremely tight-knit team, he’s like a revered grandfather: wise and beloved, confident enough to let himself be ribbed for his age, still stern and sharp enough to command respect and set a high bar. Kerr has discovered that Adams’s truth-telling doesn’t show itself in dramatic confrontation but in the steady grind of the day to day. Even during a winning streak, ‘Ron will tell me, “We stunk last night,”’ Kerr says. ‘He will say it to my face. He does not get fooled by our record. He’ll walk into practice and tell me we have to do a certain defensive drill, we can’t forget the fundamentals, because we’ve been awful.’”

Some of the highlighted breakthroughs have the potential for doing great good or great harm. As has been the case with a lot of technology through history, new discoveries have been met with enthusiasm but also often feared. Do the technologies in this article make you more hopeful for the future or do you find them frightening?

From the article: “For this year, a new technique in artificial intelligence called GANs is giving machines imagination; artificial embryos, despite some thorny ethical constraints, are redefining how life can be created and are opening a research window into the early moments of a human life; and a pilot plant in the heart of Texas’s petrochemical industry is attempting to create completely clean power from natural gas—probably a major energy source for the foreseeable future. These and the rest of our list will be worth keeping an eye on.”

Whether it was the pushback against a senator telling another to be quiet, the largest single-day demonstration in American history, or the downfall of powerful men, it’s been a bad year for sexist thinking. Of course, there’s still a long way to go.

From the article: “A lot has happened in a year, so we’ve created a timeline of some of the biggest turning points against harassment and inequality in 2017.”

Researchers are mapping not just the present but also quite likely the future of urban areas as the poor keep getting poorer and the rich keep getting richer, and the boundary between the two is a high, invisible wall.

From the article: “To visualize the landscape of economic inequality in U.S. cities, the mapping whizzes at ESRI have created a captivating story map with multiple layers. It presents America’s stark income disparities—and in the few places where it exists, income diversity.”

This is a superhero bonus link. Most people probably don’t know that Wolverine, one of the X-Men, was deliberately portrayed as a Christian. The person who posted this video writes, “While on vacation Rogue, Gambit, and Wolverine get into a skiing accident and take refuge in a monastery. Here they meet Nightcrawler, a mutant that has been mistaken as a demon by the townsfolk. The 3 X-Men then help the monks get through to the locals while at the same time finding answers to some of their own questions.”

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About the Author

Stan Friedman is the news and online editor for the Covenant Companion and is grateful for the opportunity to serve in a job that combines his newspaper and pastoral ministry experience. He has been to 15 Bruce Springsteen concerts in four cities and listened to “Thunder Road” an average of at least once a day for 41 years.